Product pricing solutions using hybrid machine learning algorithm

Abstract

E-commerce platforms have been around for over two decades now, and their popularity among buyers and sellers alike has been increasing. With the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a boom in online shopping, with many sellers moving their businesses towards e-commerce platforms. Product pricing is quite difficult at this increased scale of online shopping, considering the number of products being sold online. For instance, the strong seasonal pricing trends in clothes—where Brand names seem to sway the prices heavily. Electronics, on the other hand, have product specification-based pricing, which keeps fluctuating. This work aims to help business owners price their products competitively based on similar products being sold on e-commerce platforms based on the reviews, statistical and categorical features. A hybrid algorithm X-NGBoost combining extreme gradient boost (XGBoost) with natural gradient boost (NGBoost) is proposed to predict the price. The proposed model is compared with the ensemble models like XGBoost, LightBoost and CatBoost. The proposed model outperforms the existing ensemble boosting algorithms.